Broken

I was so sure, years ago, that if I studied enough, the art of writing, if I prepared myself sufficiently, one day I could officially call myself ‘a writer’. I was even committed to write not for fame or fortune but for God. Not preach, just lived experience as a ‘Follower of the Way’.

I’ve been writing to a mostly unknown readership in one public format or another since 1990. Sometimes I take time to go reread my past ramblings. I’m easily discouraged though about the worth of what I pen. Now and again I feel as though I have said everything I can say, in as many ways as I can say it and I start considering it might be time to pull the plug. But this is an ongoing battle.

One day, awhile back, feeling invisible and irrelevant, I had a frank and brutal meeting with myself. I asked me, “What have you accomplished?” and “What is the point of writing when you are mostly just talking to yourself?” I decided it was time to pull the plug. To admit that I had failed. To stop. No one would notice or care, I was pretty sure.

I shared this decision with an email friend. Here’s what she replied to me:

“Well, first who do you think God thinks you are? What makes you think you can determine what God makes happen with the smallest thing you do? Father God’s amazing creation, this art that He designed, is not big because it is big. It’s big because it is made up of the tiniest bits. God’s MO is seen in the way all things, great and small, come together for good for those who love Him.”

And then, to add salt to the wound, she added, “So what if you never see what God can do with your small efforts? So what if you haven’t fulfilled your dream according to your vision? So what if you are limited and thwarted by one thing or another? Isaiah said, ‘Here I am Lord, send me.’ And so God did. Was there a man of God more thwarted and seemingly unsuccessful in his efforts to stand for God?”

I, of course, was stunned, instantly ashamed and I think bleeding internally. I had nothing to respond with for a bit. She was just so painfully right.

But that wasn’t the end of it. This was at the bottom of the Oswald Chambers’ devotional that very day:

Wisdom from Oswald Chambers

Wherever the providence of God may dump us down, in a slum, in a shop, in the desert, we have to labour along the line of His direction. Never allow this thought—“I am of no use where I am,” because you certainly can be of no use where you are not! Wherever He has engineered your circumstances, pray. So Send I You, 1325 L

“Uncle!” I cried. “Okay! I get it!”

So, this is me, sharing what I learned - it isn’t what we think we can do, it isn’t what our hands accomplish or where our feet take us, it’s what God does with what we have to offer even the broken pieces, right where we are that defines how well we have served. No one else has to see or know.

We are all broken, but apparently things need to be broken in order to bring renewal of better things.

Once I got past feeling uselessly broken, it was liberating. I knew I could do something, even the smallest thing, like a quick prayer for a stranger, offered with the right heart and it would be sufficient for that moment.

Suddenly my sense of failure and smallness was completely irrelevant.